Charles Hallberg's first showing at the Chicago Art Institute was the Open Sea which hung in the room with the old masters in February of 1901. With this exhibition and the others which followed, he became well known exclusively for his "marines."

It was predicted in the 1905 April issue of the Chicago based Fine Arts Journal that, “There is hope that from the ranks of Chicago artists will come a painter of the sea—the actual sea—in its profoundest suggestion of depth and mightiness that shall command the respect of the world of art at large.”*

At the 1906 Chicago Art Institute exhibition where Hallberg had a one-man show, there were forty-one (41) marine paintings of his to view. It was reported that, "The variety of canvases was unusual, showing coloring and light effects under the varying aspects of the day, the clime and the seasons. . . . In no instance may a picture be said to reflect the style of another man."*

When Hallberg first started showing his work, it was the renown Swedish artist Anders Zorn, Birger Sandzén's art instructor and official Swedish commissioner of art for the ﻿﻿﻿1893 World’s Columbian Exposition﻿﻿﻿, who encouraged him to drop his job as the janitor at the Austin State Bank in Chicago and to make his living as a painter.

Born in Göteborg, Sweden on January 15, 1855, Hallberg would become a self-taught artist. His introduction to art was as a twelve year old when he saw several watercolor paintings in the home of a playmate and copied them using crayons. Here is where his passion for sketching and painting began.

As his father had abandon his family when he was very young, Hallberg would have little time for school. Instead he found work to support himself, his mother and sister. At 17, he was hired to work on board a British brig. This was the beginning of a career which found him serving before the mast under various flags for the next decade.

In 1883 he arrived in America and from Chicago sailed on the Great Lakes for the next seven (7) years, making many sketches of the inland seas while a sailor. In 1885 he married Amanda Josefine Olson of Göteborg on January 21. They began their family in 1887 with Ellen Hermina, followed by Sylvia Helena in 1890 and Austin Benjamin in 1892. They were members of the Swedish Lutheran Church.

In 1890, he left his job as a sailor and became a janitor in an apartment building on LaSalle Street. Eighteen months later, he accepted a janitorial job at the Austin State Bank and a next door apartment building. There at the Bank, he practiced his art in a small room in the basement when he was not working.

From the 1901 show of his Open Sea at the Chicago Art Institute, his career as a marine painter took off. In all Hallberg was to show sixty-three (63) works at the Institute between 1902 and his last inclusion in 1927 in addition to the forty-one (41) paintings exhibited at the Institute in the one-man show in 1906. In short, between the Chicago Art Institute and the Chicago Swedish Club, he would exhibit his paintings 33 times from 1902 to 1927 .

In 1904 during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (also called the St. Louis World's Fair), his Summer Day on Lake Michigan was accepted by the national art jury. He was one of 2 Swedish Americans out of nineteen (19) Chicago artists to have this great honor. Their works hung in the magnificent general art hall, Festival Hall, of the Exposition.

Hallberg most likely met Birger Sandzén in Chicago when they was showing their works at the Chicago Art Institute and at the Chicago Swedish Club. Chicago could also be the place where Lydia met him as well since she did have relatives there and she first started studying art there at the University of Chicago years before her classes with Sandzén.

How she came by the Hallberg paintings is pure speculation as it has been with the Jacobson painting. Did Hallberg give Lydia the paintings or did he give them to Sandzén and then Sandzén gave them to Lydia are the questions.

Besides these two Hallbergs, I have seen others hanging at Bethany College and at the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery. From time to time Sandzén's daughter Margaret Sandzén Greenough, would borrow the above 1909 painting for their shows.

I have yet to discover a large art gallery on Hallberg here in America. In his life, he was a celebrated Swedish artist in Chicago and Sweden where some of his works were hung, a few of which in his Swedish home town of Göteborg at the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Some of his works are most likely with the descendants of those members of the Chicago Swedish Club in Hallberg's day and some, perhaps, may be at the Chicago Art Institute.

When visiting the Swedish American Museum in Chicago in 2010, they also had two beautiful Hallbergs which they let me see. It is always fun to "search" for the sea vessel in these paintings, most of which are there but very difficult to see at "first glance."

Both paintings arrived in California with the estate in 1984 and each received the needed conservation work they so duly deserved twenty years later with the Jacobson.